For the last half dozen years this web site has
served as my "explorer's notebook". It
documents, in a very personal voice, my journey of discovery
through the worlds of energy, ecology, economics
and human culture. It describes my point of
view on the largely unrecognized, widely
misunderstood and potentially tragic predicament
facing humanity as a result of our refusal to
accept limits on our activities or aspirations.

I no
longer see any point in singling out individual
aspects of the human experience for special
attention or criticism. Population growth, climate
change, global corporatism, chemical pollution,
resource depletion, species extinctions, ocean
overfishing and acidification, global financial
instability, mounting social disparities and
injustices are all merely symptoms of a system that
has been out of control for centuries (despite our
earnest attempts to convince ourselves otherwise.) We have no choice left - or
perhaps we never really had any other choice - but to ride
the dragon until the human overshoot corrects
itself, as overshoots always do.

The silver
lining I see is that all the pressures coming
from this process of correction can be useful
goads toward personal self-development. "In all matters, strive to
do the right thing." What does this mean to
each of us? What does mindful living in the
midst of the whirlwind entail, what does it
require of us in terms of personal growth,
in the development of wisdom and
self-awareness? How might each of us resolve
our alienation - from each other, from our
societies, from nature, from our own place
in the universe? How may we find the
re-connections that are essential if we are
to emerge from this tumultuous, careless
human adolescence into individual and
collective adulthood? These are deep
questions for dark times.Paul
Chefurka

When it comes to our understanding of the unfolding global
crisis, each of us seems to fit somewhere along a
continuum of awareness that can be roughly divided into
five stages:

Dead asleep.
At this stage there seem to be no fundamental
problems, just some shortcomings in human
organization, behaviour and morality that can be fixed
with the proper attention to rule-making. People at
this stage tend to live their lives happily, with
occasional outbursts of annoyance around election
times or the quarterly corporate earnings seasons.

Awareness of one
fundamental problem. Whether it's Climate
Change, overpopulation, Peak Oil, chemical pollution,
oceanic over-fishing, biodiversity loss, corporatism,
economic instability or sociopolitical injustice, one
problem seems to engage the attention completely.
People at this stage tend to become ardent activists
for their chosen cause. They tend to be very vocal
about their personal issue, and blind to any others.

Awareness of many
problems. As people let in more evidence from
different domains, the awareness of complexity begins
to grow. At this point a person worries about
the prioritization of problems in terms of their
immediacy and degree of impact. People at this stage
may become reluctant to acknowledge new problems - for
example, someone who is committed to fighting for
social justice and against climate change may not
recognize the problem of resource depletion.
They may feel that the problem space is already
complex enough, and the addition of any new concerns
will only dilute the effort that needs to be focused
on solving the "highest priority" problem.

Awareness of the
interconnections between the many problems.
The realization that a solution in one domain may
worsen a problem in another marks the beginning of
large-scale system-level thinking. It also marks the
transition from thinking of the situation in terms of
a set of problems
to thinking of it in terms of a predicament. At
this point the possibility that there may not be a
solution begins to raise its head.

People who arrive at this stage tend to withdraw into
tight circles of like-minded individuals in order to
trade insights and deepen their understanding of
what's going on. These circles are necessarily small,
both because personal dialogue is essential for this
depth of exploration, and because there just aren't
very many people who have arrived at this level of
understanding.

Awareness that
the predicament encompasses all aspects of life.
This includes everything we do, how we do it, our
relationships with each other, as well as our
treatment of the rest of the biosphere and the
physical planet. With this realization, the floodgates
open, and no problem is exempt from consideration or
acceptance. The very concept of a "Solution" is seen
through, and cast aside as a waste of effort.

For those who arrive at Stage 5 there is a real risk that
depression will set in. After all, we've learned
throughout our lives that our hope for tomorrow lies
in our ability to solve problems today. When
no amount of human cleverness appears able to solve our
predicament the possibility of hope can vanish like a the
light of a candle flame, to be replaced by the suffocating
darkness of despair.

How people cope with despair is of course deeply personal,
but it seems to me there are two general routes people
take to reconcile themselves with the situation.
These are not mutually exclusive, and most of us will
operate out of some mix of the two. I identify them
here as general tendencies, because people seem to be
drawn more to one or the other. I call them the outer path and the inner path.

If one is inclined to choose the outer path, concerns
about adaptation and local resilience move into the
foreground, as exemplified by the Transition
Network and Permaculture
Movement. To those on the outer path,
community-building and local sustainability initiatives
will have great appeal. Organized party politics
seems to be less attractive to people at this stage,
however. Perhaps politics is seen as part of the
problem, or perhaps it's just seen as a waste of effort
when the real action will take place at the local level.

If one is disinclined to choose the outer path either
because of temperament or circumstance, the inner path
offers its own set of attractions.

Choosing the inner path
involves re-framing the whole thing in terms of
consciousness, self-awareness and/or some form of
transcendent perception. For someone on this path it
is seen as an attempt to manifest Gandhi's message, "Become the change you wish
to see in the world," on the most profoundly
personal level. This message is similarly expressed
in the ancient Hermetic saying, "As above, so below." Or in plain
language, "In
order to heal the world, first begin by healing
yourself."

However, the inner path does not imply a "retreat into religion".
Most of the people I've met who have chosen an inner path
have as little use for traditional religion as their
counterparts on the outer path have for traditional
politics. Organized religion is usually seen as part
of the predicament rather than a valid response to it.
Those who have arrived at this point have no interest in
hiding from or easing the painful truth, rather they wish
to create a coherent personal context for it. Personal
spirituality of one sort or another often works for this,
but organized religion rarely does.

It's worth mentioning that there
is also the possibility of a serious personal
difficulty at this point. If someone cannot
choose an outer path for whatever reasons, and is
also resistant to the idea of inner growth or
spirituality as a response the the crisis of an
entire planet, then they are truly in a bind. There
are few other doorways out of this depth of
despair. If one remains stuck here for an
extended period of time, life can begin to seem
awfully bleak, and violence against either the world
or oneself may begin begin to seem like a reasonable
option. Keep a watchful eye on your own
progress, and if you encounter someone else who may
be in this state, please offer them a supportive
ear.

From my observations, each successive stage contains
roughly a tenth of the number people as the one before it.
So while perhaps 90% of humanity is in Stage 1, less than
one person in ten thousand will be at Stage 5 (and none of
them are likely to be politicians). The number of
those who have chosen the inner path in Stage 5 also seems
to be an order of magnitude smaller than the number who
are on the outer path.

I happen to have chosen an inner path as my response to a
Stage 5 awareness. It works well for me, but navigating
this imminent (transition, shift, metamorphosis - call it
what you will), will require all of us - no matter what
our chosen paths - to cooperate on making wise decisions
in difficult times.